Minimum Orders Explained for Salons
By The Velocity Wear Team
The minimum is 50 pieces per design, with sizes mixed freely inside it. A six-chair salon reaches 50 more easily than it expects once each stylist has three polos and the rota covers juniors, weekend cover and new starters. What counts separately is the design, so one logo on one garment in one colour is a single run.
How does a 50-piece minimum work for a small salon?
Count pieces, not people. A salon where eight staff each need three shirts is already at twenty-four, and adding a spare set for new starters, weekend cover and the inevitable bleach casualty takes it past forty. Uniform stock is also not perishable: a design that does not change year to year can be bought once and drawn down for eighteen months. That is the opposite of the fashion buying problem, and it makes the minimum much less of an obstacle than it first sounds.
Can several sites be combined into one order?
Yes, and it is the single best move available to a small group. Three salons ordering fifty each pay the 50-piece rate three times; the same three ordering 150 together move into the 100 to 249 tier and pay less per piece with one setup rather than three. The discount reaches up to 35 per cent at the highest tier. The condition is that the design has to be identical, so a site name under the logo breaks it back into separate runs.
What counts as a separate design for a salon?
A change of artwork, a garment colour that forces the decoration to be rebuilt, or a different garment type. Sizes never count and cost nothing extra. This matters most where salons want to distinguish roles: stylists in black and juniors in grey is two runs, whereas everyone in black with the role shown on a badge is one. Minimum order quantities explained covers the general rule, and pricing is in what salons pay for branded clothing.
What if fifty polos is genuinely more than you need?
Look at what else carries the same logo. Towels are quoted per job and used in volume in every salon, gowns and caps carry branding, and a retail piece sold at the front desk uses the same artwork. None of those merge into one run of 50, but they do mean the artwork setup is doing more work across the business. The salons and barbers page shows the range, and the wholesale page explains how orders are placed.
How do you plan an order around new starters?
Hold spares rather than reordering for individuals. Since every run has to reach 50 pieces, a salon that orders exactly enough shirts for today has no way to clothe the stylist who starts in March except by placing another full run. Keeping six to eight pieces back in the sizes you hire into solves that for a year, and it costs nothing extra because those pieces were already inside the minimum.
The same logic applies to the bleach casualties. A shirt ruined in month two is not an emergency if there is a replacement on the shelf, and it is a fortnight of someone working out of uniform if there is not. Build the spares into the original count instead of treating them as an extra the budget cannot carry.
Keep the spares in a cupboard nobody has to ask permission to open. Uniform held in a manager’s office is uniform that stays there, and a stylist working a Saturday in their own clothes because the spare shirt was locked away defeats the point of having ordered fifty in the first place. Count what is left twice a year and reorder before the useful sizes are gone. A shelf that is checked in January and July is a shelf that never surprises anybody, and the count takes less time than explaining to a client why the person cutting their hair is out of uniform.
